Russian Firm Will Reward Staff With Crypto Tokens Tied to Profits

Qiwi Blockchain Technologies (QBT), a subsidiary of the Russian e-payments firm Qiwi, plans to incentivize staff by rewarding them with a custom token.

According to a report from Russian news agency Interfax on Monday, QBT – which was launched in March to develop in-house blockchain solutions and provide consultation services around token issuance – plans to issue a token that is tied to the company’s profit.

Konstantine Koltsov, a partner at the firm, told CoinDesk that up to 50 percent of the net profit will be allocated for the rewards program, and each token will be worth around 0.001 percent of the net profit. The program has apparently already been approved by Qiwi CEO Sergey Solonin and is expected to go live in the third or fourth quarter of this year.

To determine how the rewards tokens are divided among staff, a second token will be used to assign voting rights. Departments’ heads will get different amounts of voting tokens according to their weight in the company, and will then be able to use them to decide the allocation of bonus tokens among other staff.

In the future, voting tokens will also be handed out to all employees of the firm to provide them with an opportunity to vote on management decisions and hiring and firing, for example. They will also be able to evaluate their co-workers performances via the system, rewarding better performers with more bonus tokens.

This model should be more efficient than the key performance indicator (KPI)-based evaluation models now used by many corporations, Koltsov said. While only a few dozen people work at QBT currently, that number is likely to grow to around 100 by the mid-2019, he added.

One problem facing the program in the short-term is that, due to the absence of crypto regulation in Russia, the tokens can’t be cashed out into fiat currency such as rubles. However, holding them will make employees eligible for quarterly bonuses proportional to the amount of tokens owned.

The system supporting the tokens – which are based on ethereum’s ERC-721 standard – is built on the Masterchain platform, according to the firm. Koltsov told CoinDesk that Masterchain had been chosen largely due to its its convenience for Russian companies, some of which are already familiar with the platform.

He added:

“Many other public networks in this field are less predictable as they have their decision makers defining the rules of the game.”

Masterchain was developed by a group of banks and payment firms – including Qiwi – under the governance of the Central Bank of Russia and completed just over a year ago.

QBT also has plans to patent its system as a fully-fledged token management system and market it as a corporate management product.

Last month, managers from QBT founded a crypto investment bank called HASH to manage clients’ ICOs and help them invest in blockchain startups.

Qiwi CEO Sergey Solonin image via Shutterstock

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